Hands On: Nexuiz

If I was to tell you that I recently had some hands on time with a first person arena shooter for consoles and enjoyed myself immensely would it come to some surprise? I'll be honest, competitive gaming and the FPS genre are not usually me cup of tea, but Illfonic's Nexuiz brought out a side of the gamer in me that I thought was long dead. Based on the popular open source PC title of the same name, Nexuiz harkens back to a day when things like Quake and Unreal Tournament where actually good and competition between friends was fierce.

Setting aside long-winded plots about bald space marines and their daddy issues, this game goes right for the jugular emphasizing instant deathmatch multiplayer that takes advantage of some of the strangest power-ups I've seen this side of Power Stone. While this lean and mean downloadable title for Xbox LIVE Arcade and the PlayStation Network provides players with the standards (Deathmatch, Capture The Flag, Shotguns, Sniper rifles, etc.), those that excel at the game are rewarded with the ability to pick between various Dynamic Mutations. These bonuses keep players on their toes as the round leaders will activate temporary modifications the match. These include low gravity, grappling hooks, infinite ammo, health capturing, and more. During my time with the demo, it became easy to lose track of the time we had spent on a single match due to the constant changes that would unique benefit one play style or another. The fundamentals of what one would want from a console shooter are, but there were few dull moments with a mixtape-like approach to the power-ups.

When an Illfonic team member started going over the multiplayer options for Nexuiz you could tell that they were very serious about providing one of the most complete set of options available. With plans to include in-game online tournament matching, in depth leaderboards, 4 player local multiplayer, and some incredible sounding DLC that they weren't ready to share with everyone, I realized that Nexuiz was exactly the type of game that I dreamed of when I played first person shooters a little more competitively and could be just the thing to get lapsed genre fans back into the fold. It didn't hurt that the Pre-Alpha build that I played looked great with a futuristic Victorian visual design and ran at impressive frame rates during our hectic three player local multiplayer match. I was stunned when they told me that the build was representative of two and half months of development when the game looked shippable. The team credited this to the game's open source beginnings and a lot of hard work. We'll find out if it all pays off the summer when Nexuiz is released.